I 4 INTRODUCTION 



Evidently there is opportunity and need for the economist to analyze 

 and expound this phase of agricultural organization. One suspects 

 that he might reveal significant wastes of managerial ability in a sys- 

 tem where the great majority are limited to small, privately organized 

 farms, and a crippling lack of such ability where nearly every farm 

 worker must organize and conduct his own industrial unit. Much 

 the same may be said for capital and labor. When the alert business 

 man finds that there are opportunities to make capital earn larger 

 returns in agriculture under his own direction than by loaning it to 

 farmers, or greater chances of reward to entrepreneurship in farming 

 than in commercial operations, then we may be sure that the existing 

 organization is going to meet competition of a new order. Whether 

 the economist shrewdly traces out these influences and tendencies a 

 day before they become working realities, or whether he be simply an 

 up-to-date and intelligent interpreter of what is going on about him, 

 his services in this direction are much needed if we are to act intelli- 

 gently toward the future of our husbandry. 



/Agricultural economics should teach us to think through the 

 Utopia of co-operation or the bogey of corporation farming to the 

 fundamental issues of effective economic organization of human effort 

 and natural resources, which underlie them. Beneath the superficial 

 problems, such as how best to distribute a carload of peaches, to pro- 

 cure a blooded breeding animal, or to effect the underdrainage of a 

 particular field, are to be discerned certain larger, more general prin- 

 ciples whose operation determines what is the most efficient way of 

 equipping labor with capital-goods and captaining it with entrepre- 

 neurship for the production of agricultural commodities. That is the 

 ultimate problem of agricultural economics, and, whether social wel- 

 fare or private gain be taken as the point of departure, the real battle 

 must be fought upon this ground. 



To set forth explicitly the goal and purpose of our work is in large 

 measure to clear up our ideas as to the proper scope and manner of 

 treatment of the subject itself. The essential reason we have for 

 teaching economics at all is that the student may learn to "think 

 economics," to trace the cause-and-result sequence as touching the 

 phenomena of wealth, whether the specific problem in which these 

 phenomena have their setting be one which involves his immediate 

 interest in private income and property or the larger interest which 

 as a citizen or member of some other social group he is bound to have 



